Sage RTI Surgery with Helen Hargreaves

Throughout this week Sage are working with AccountingWEB and Helen Hargreaves, Senior Policy & Research Officer at the CIPP to answer Sage customer’s questions on the tricky details of RTI. Below is a live transcript of the questions and answers as they happen.

Hi Kenny and Steven G from yesterday
Yes i have received an offical response from HMRC who said:
"The important message is that RTI does not change the calculation of PAYE for directors. EIM26505 applies. The question is whether the payment is or is on account of earnings or whether it is a loan which is subject to a beneficial loan benefit in kind charge."
Guidance explaining EIm 26505 is available at: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/eimanual/EIM26505.htm

Hi Helen,I am interested in the answer to the question posed by Steven G yesterday regarding one man company director's salary being credited to the DLA account. Have you had any guidance back the HMRC on this matter?

This reply is for the guest asking about quarterly payments.
If your client is paying less than £1500 then yes they can pay quarterly, however they will still need to submit an FPS to HMRC each time the employees are paid. This weblink has more information http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/payinghmrc/paye.htm

I have a limited company client that pays subcontractors and makes CIS returns. No salary is paid to the only employee, the director. There is a PAYE scheme. Do I have to submit EAS and EPS returns for the director? Previously a simple Nil P35 was submitted each year.

Hi Brian
You can do an EAS for this although i would check with the Sage helpdesk first on 0845 111 2451 just to make sure that this is how the software has been set up. However, the action you will need to take is to submit EPSs and actually you dont need to ave submitted an EAS to be able to submit an EPS. A quick call to Sage will clarify how they have dealt with this requirement.
After that, if there are no payments to report on an FPS, you must instead submit an EPS to indicate no payment is due for one or more (up to a maximum of six) complete tax months. Using the period of inactivity box means you would only need to do this twice a year as you can go up to six months ahead. At the year end, you must submit an EPS to indicate that this is your 'Final submission for the tax year' and answer the end of year declarations and questions.

i have always processed my payroll using saturdays as a process date is the submission date for FPS the date you actually transmit the data so is there a difference betweenthe process date and the date you actually submit?

Hi Jennifer
If you operate a payroll to deduct the tax and you have a PAYE scheme then yes you will need some kind of payroll software as that is now the only way you can report PAYE deductions.
If the deductions are not made trough a payroll then you can simply carry on with the process you have now.
As i mentioned earlier, there is a lot of confusion about the interaction between CIS and RTI. But the key thing to know is that the process hasn't vhanged, only the way you report PAYE. if you didnt have a PAYE scheme before then you don't need one now. If you did, and you report these deductions through it, then you will need to report using RTI and you can only do that through software.

Sorry if you have covered this already, but quite a number of payrolls we run for clients which are weekly paid have employees who are paid by different methods - cash, cheque and bank transfer, within the same payroll. So whilst the payments may all be initiated on the same date, the date that the payments are available to the individual employees could be different. We use Sage payroll and as far as I am aware there is not the facility to show different payment dates within each weekly run, and we would not want to have to show three runs each week! How should we deal with this?

Hi Helen,One of our client payrolls is a weekly paid scheme and we were notified that the remaining employee had left the company's employment but only received that advice after their final payday, by which time we had submitted the FPS without having prepared the P45. As no more payments will be made I cannot submit another FPS which would tell HMRC that the employee has left. How can I get around this or doesn't it matter?!!Thanks. John